A few weeks ago, I had an exchange of opinions with the @cttpodcast people about the future of Network States and Hive. Prior to that, I had already shared my opinion on the significance of Network States becoming a popular concept and the role I believe Hive has to play. While no one explicitly stated that Hive is a Network State, we are the closest to Balaji's vision, and I see this as a great opportunity for Hive to use this narrative as a huge marketing lever to reach a wider audience. However, I also believe that Hive can still be free to not follow Balaji's schedule, including crowdfunding a piece of land, which seems far-fetched to me after some thinking.
I have a huge respect for the entire @spknetwork team, and for Dan personally. I believe the tools they build are going to be a huge improvement for Hive, and I have been voting for @threespeak witness for some time already. However, I see this issue differently, and I would love to test this optics with their vision and community feedback.
In my second article, I described how much Hive fits into the given definitions and how much Hive needs a simple, understandable narrative to be embraced by people. Containers of social media, platforms, or protocols to build on can be limiting or foreign to a larger audience. There might be a temptation to fit into an even bigger narrative and encompass other entities under the Hive infrastructure-provider umbrella. However, I see this as a risky game. Hence, Hive faces a dilemma to solve, a crossroad.
After some thinking, I have formed an opinion. However, first, let's state some facts and assumptions I operate under. I believe that it is not by accident that the idea of Network States gained wider recognition after decentralized ledger technology has been battle-tested by years of struggling in the free market. Blockchain was simply the missing puzzle to create for this idea a bridge from imagination to reality.
In other words, monetary independence from fiat money is a key component and a solid base upon which any digital statehood might be imagined. Rate of inflation, distribution of tokens, APR on your savings (and a way to set it), haircut trigger, these are key metrics set by the governance of the base layer. These might and should vary between chains to create healthy economics of the future. These often reflect the general values praised by the community built around a chain. The strongest unifying force for a community is this set of rules, vision of governance, something that is not changed very often.
Here comes the feeling of sovereignty, here comes the ability to feel a common interest and shape an ownership mindset. These are very important social needs of human beings that we have been deprived of by the nation-state and corporate capitalism. On this basis, any other project, business, community, or game can be built, but not the Network State, this one is a being of a higher order.
Why would any group of people decide to build on some protocol, having no power on tokenomics and governance of the base layer? The software is open source (very good!) and can be copied and started with different parameters with the ability to create decentralized governance from day one. Or any other kind of semi-decentralized software might be built to support a different set of values of a given Network State. It seems much more attractive than working your ass off to get to TOP20 witnesses as a representative of a layer 2 Network State to get any say in governance.
Even if the layer 2 solution provides a full set of tools to create any model possible, there is still a notion of dependence on layer one, which, even if not based on real premises, will be felt and taken into account by the next founding fathers.
What I love about Hive is its organic nature and bottom-up organization. From time to time its good however to ask a question. What are we doing here actually? Because it might turn out we are so far ahead of a curve, we might be missed by running train of events. I'd love to see this train to stop on station called Hive. Do you know what I mean?
Illustrations are one my first tries with MidJourney.